Friday 21 October 2011 08.25 EDT
First published on Friday 21 October 2011 08.25 EDT

A senior BBC News executive has defended the corporation's use of "undoubtedly shocking and disturbing" video of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in his dying moments.

Mary Hockaday, head of the BBC multimedia newsroom, said using the grainy mobile phone images – which showed a bloodied and beaten Gaddafi moments before his death – was editorially justified to convey the scale of Thursday's "dramatic and gruesome" events.

Writing on the BBC Editors' Blog on Friday, Hockaday said: "In the age of mobile phones, footage of the capture of Gaddafi soon started to emerge. We could not always be clear of its origins so it was important to make what checks we could and then be very clear with our audiences what we'd been able to verify and what we hadn't.

"The other challenge was posed by the nature of the footage itself – very graphic, some of it showing Gaddafi alive but manhandled and bloody and other footage and stills showing his dead and bloodied body. We judged that it was right to use some footage and stills, with warnings about their nature."

Like most major news organisations in Britain and overseas, including the Guardian on its live blog, the BBC used unverified graphic images of Gaddafi before his death was confirmed on its 24-hour news channel.

On Friday, all the UK national newspapers ran graphic images of the ousted dictator on their front pages, with many more pictures inside. The front pages prompted a small backlash on Twitter, with some users complaining that children could easily see the grisly pictures.

Late on Thursday afternoon as details of Gaddafi's death were emerging, the BBC appeared to omit the pictures from its online news coverage. However, they were included in BBC1's 6pm and 10pm news bulletins.

Hockaday said: "There were undoubtedly shocking and disturbing images from yesterday. But as a news organisation our role is to report what happened, and that can include shocking and disturbing things.

"We thought carefully about the use of pictures – which incidentally we used more sparingly than many other UK media – and I believe that overall they were editorially justified to convey the nature of yesterday's dramatic and gruesome events."

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